Just yesterday, I shared my list of the best movies of the 1940s with you. The readers who have been reading the blog longer must have forseen, then, that the results from the voting among members of the Cinema em Cena message board wouldn’t be long in the coming. Well, here it is! Just as we had expected, for each decade we move back in time, fewer voters take part in the process. So far, we’d been keeping the voting open until we reached 15 “best of the decade” lists. For the 1940s, that was not possible; ultimately, we had ten voters (myself included): two with lists of 10 movies, one with 12, one with 14 and the remaining with lists of 20 movies (the rules state that lists must have any number between 10 and 20 movies to be considered valid). Due to the low number of participants, one would expect the final list to be messy, with many ties, but that’s not what happened. In fact, there was only one tie among the first 20 movies. We had a problem, however, in the bottom of the list, between places 19 and 23, because each of the movies in this interval was listed by only two voters, too few to be statistically relevant and with minimal differences in points among them. For this reason, I’ve opted to acknowledge all of them. Here we go:

Casablanca was named by 9 out of 10 voters, and won with 151 points, against 130 from It’s a Wonderful Life, which was present in 8 of the lists. An undisputed victory, therefore. Citizen Kane, which I thought would win, came in third with 104 points, having been remembered by only 6 out of the 10 participants, something surprising for a movie so often named as the best of all times. It’s interesting to notice, however, that if the list were to be organized in terms of the average of points divided by number of voters who listed the movie, Citizen Kane would take first place, with an average of 17,33, followed by Casablanca (16,78) and Bicycle Thieves (16,5). In total, 66 different films were listed, with the exact half of them, 33, being voted by only one person. Frank Capra, John Huston, Billy Wilder, Hitchcock and the pair Emeric & Pressburger were very well represented. The curiosity is that Jacques Tourneur was remembered by various voters, but only managed to take a 19th position (Cat People and I Walked with a Zombie weren’t too far behind, but not close enough to the 23rd place either).

From these movies, I haven’t yet seen The Red Shoes, Laura, Out of the Past, Letter from an Unknown Woman, Black Narcissus and The Heiress. Those excluded, I can say that it’s hard to pick a better list between this and the one from the 1950s. Both count on absolute classics, great movies that any movie lover should try to know. By the way, this was one of only two cases so far in which my number one movie was the winner in the general poll (the other one was The Godfather, in the 1970s). So, I have nothing to complain about.